These are all terrible uses of Bitcoin, as mentioned in the OP. All transactions are publicly visible in an immutable database. With a little investigation, law enforcement can find out who owns certain accounts and trace transactions very easily from there. If you are a criminal, you want no paper trail whatsoever, which is why they use paper money.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous if you take enough precautions i.e. always use tor, only use addresses once, coin join everything before converting.

I guess that’d work if you’re the guy from White Collar or something, but I’m not sure your average criminal would have the attention to detail and knowledge to get that all right. And one misclick or bug can pretty much seal your fate.

You are right though that you can take measures to make it much more difficult to trace.

Precautions on that or higher levels of expense and complexity, like burner phones, dead drops, networks of couriers, cell and gang org structure are standard procedures in organized crime. Un"organized" single small criminals might have a larger fraction of bad opsec, but they aren't all stupid.

A few will be caught by making mistakes, but the rest will learn from that. Criminal methods undergo evolutionary pressure.

Never heard of crypto mixing obviously

What happens when the NSA hacks the mixing services or congress passes a law forcing them to store information for law enforcement? Surely the mixing services know at least for a certain amount of time where the coin is coming from and going to.

I think those laws might already exist, imho anonymous mixing could be prosecuted under the relevant money laundering laws.

Dollar is STILL the king of criminal activity, money laundering, kidnapping, ransom ... it will take awhile for the shift to happen.

I didn't say all criminal activity is done via bitcoin. But there are segments of crime like cryptotrojans and CP trading that seem to be almost exclusively bitcoin-based. Others, like internet drug ordering, are at least partially in bitcoin.

Edit: replaced "any" with "all" in the first sentence

yeah, agreed some new type of activities were using bitcoin... but after some of these gangs were busted they seem to be switching to monero...

Its very risky to buy with bitcoin if you are in a jurisdiction that makes drugs illegal. I think still cash is king in those places.

I thought the Euro was taking over thanks to the 500EU note?

They are not printing any more 500EU notes, but they do remain legal tender for now. They might start being worth more than 500EU over time. Seems like a good note to keep your cash savings in if you live in Europe.

Decline of cash is really a shame. When the $100 was introduced it was worth about $2k in today's dollars, and in my lifetime even it was worth almost $300

Yea. When buying a used car it is a pain to count out all those $100 bills. $500, at least, would be nice.

Huh. Didn't know these were all the main exports of Nigeria